Eating in Taiwan

I was about to start posting some of my Hong Kong and China pictures, but I realized I still have tons more for Taiwan. So here we go...

At first I was a little intrigued by all the different flavours of chips, so I tried these Grilled Basil Chicken Doritos. I still prefer the cool ranch chips from my childhood, but these were okay. I'm not a big chip person, so after I tried these the intrigue was gone and I didn't need to try any others (until I saw blueberry potato chips in China). Now on to the real food!


I have to say I wasn't really familiar with Taiwanese food growing up. What I mean is I grew up eating Chinese food and Taiwanese food, but to me it was just food. I wasn't aware that so many of my favorite dishes were Taiwanese until I started craving them in Shanghai and couldn't find them except at Taiwanese eateries. I love food. Good food. Taipei night markets are fabulous places to get your eat on. But the city is full of tiny noodle shops, dumpling shops, dessert shops....There're also TGI Friday's, Macaroni Grill and Swensen's if you miss the taste of America, but I did not.

Let's start with some classic Taiwanese food shall we?


Pork chop rice bowl with some pickled vegetables....mmm, I'm getting hungry.


Chopped stewed pork belly rice (滷肉飯) and some stir-fried greens


Wonton noodle soup isn't necessarily, but the green vegetables with the sauce is very Taiwanese style.


I don't know what this is called. I believe it's made with rice flour, steamed in a bowl and flipped over. In the middle is meat and mushrooms. It's delicious.


Yonghe Soy Milk (永和豆浆) This was not the best Yonghe dhou jiang breakfast, but it's the only one I have a picture of. Yummy....who wouldn't want potstickers for breakfast? My mum doesn't eat this stuff, but if I was up early enough on weekends I'd go out with my dad to get some of this tasty grub.


Grass jelly with adzuki beans and taro and yam balls from Meet Fresh. Meet Fresh is a Taiwanese dessert house franchise. They have shops everywhere in Taiwan which pleased me to bits. I went there nearly every week for tofu pudding in peanut soup or adzuki bean soup with sweet rice balls. I really missed this stuff when I was in Shanghai.


One of many visits to Meet Fresh. I love this place!


Tofu pudding in peanut soup


Cuttlefish soup (魷魚羹) and sliced bean curd with sauce.


Beef Noodle Soup (牛肉麵) Taiwan-style


Taipei has awesome bakeries and it seems like there are two on every block. I ate a different bun or cake from breakfast everyday until I got sick of them.


One of my favorites. It's a sweet bread baked in the shape of a nerf football. In the middle is some sweet crumbly buttery stuff and raisins. We like to call it bomb bread.


Another bakery


The rest of these are pretty common foods that aren't unique to Taiwan.


Necks and tongues. Don't worry, the rest of my pictures are far more appetizing.


Dumplings!! These are boiled. Also hot and sour soup.


Dumplings!! Little steamed ones (小籠饅) at dinner with relatives. I ate most of the dumplings.


Sweet potato vendor. I don't really like them, but I like the carts.


More dumplings! Potstickers at Ba Fang (八方), another franchise I love. I always got a bowl of hot and sour soup with my dumplings. YUM!


There's this tiny little dumpling cart at the night market near the hospital. My mom had read in a local paper that this dumpling cart was highly recommended, so we checked it out. I'd always seen a long line of people patiently waiting for cheap dumplings, but I had never tried it. While the dumplings are cooking, they wrap the next batch.

Tada!

My sack of tasty tasty dumplings. Too bad I didn't know how delicious these were until my last weeks in Taipei. The filling is mostly cabbage, with some shreds of carrot, scallions, and a few tiny dried shrimp. and also probably a good deal of MSG. I know this because I made a point to try to recreate these when I returned to the US. Well, I did try to recreate these, and I failed. I wish I had a few of these right now. I'm so hungry. Mmmm....


Little hot pots (火鍋)


Some savory bread-like yummies


Unfortunately the popular way to make coffee here is the instant way. I got used to the 3-in-1 instant mix with coffee, creamer and sugar, but I can't really call that stuff real coffee. It took me a while to find coffee beans, but I finally found some affordable beans at Carrefour. Yay for French supermarket chains!


A steam bun shop. You'd be surprised at the all flavours

Getting my chocolate and brown sugar buns from the steamer.


This is a cafeteria. These great because I could help myself to seaweed, stir-fried mushrooms, and fried chicken (my usual cafeteria fare). And it comes with a soup. If you chose to eat there, you have to dump your leftovers into a slop bucket next to the rubbish bins so the city can collect the food waste.

There you go. Hope you're hungry now. I am!

Shilin Night Market

One thing I miss the most about Taiwan is the night markets. After we left the National Palace Museum, we took a bus back to the MRT station and walked over to Shilin Night Market, one of the larger more well-known night markets. We hit the street portion of the market first which is mostly clothing, shoes, accessories and other non-food goodies.






There was a slightly odd variety show on a stage outside...


All the food stalls are housed in here...most of it is closed during the day, but at night it's crowded with locals, tourists and students.


everything from bubble tea and smoothies to fried chicken and omelettes, not to mention the more tradition noodle soups and stinky tofu.


We saw a few places had a seafood dish that looked good. We picked a place to sit down, and we're handed the order form...

Challenge: neither my brother or I can call ourselves properly literate in Chinese. I can read a few characters here and there, but that doesn't really help to read this menu. A woman stood at our table waiting for us to take our order, so I just asked her straight, "What's that seafood stuff out front?" She told us and pointed to it on the order form. We ordered our two little bowls of seafood. Yay! It's always a relief when I can get through a situation like this without having to reveal that I'm actually a foreigner, and I can't read.




I wish I could blog the smell of a really pungent stinky tofu. Sometimes it's fried, sometimes not. This stuff pictured here actually wasn't that stinky compared to some others. In my experience, you can pretty much always smell a stinky tofu vendor before you see it. And the it seems like the stinkiest ones seem to be the most popular.  When I smell some stinky tofu, I always want to say, "好臭!" (It stinks!)  to which my dad likes to respond, "好香!" (smells good!)

oyster omelette




I'm actually not quite sure what this stuff is.

Snake Alley and Longshan Temple

The evening after our visit to the toilet restaurant back in December when I first arrived in Taiwan, we headed to Huaxi Night Market, also famously known as Snake Alley. At Snake Alley, if you desire you can eat snake, watch a live snake being gutted, as well as drink a shot made from the snake's blood or bile. Or if you'd rather not have snake, maybe you'd like some turtle, or perhaps imbibe a drink made from the turtle's blood. We watched a woman cut a soft-shelled turtle and then serve drinks made with it's blood. Hey, tasty, eh? No, we didn't drink any blood, and the snake people don't allow you to take pictures. That's cool, I don't need to keep pictures of a live snake being skinned.

But we did try some snake soup... It's meant to be more medicinal than palatable. If you're after a tasty hearty bowl of soup, this is not what you want. People eat this stuff for it's supposed therapeutic properties. Snake Alley is a covered "market", and I found the atmosphere to be a bit seedy, kind of like a tunnel filled with neon signs, snake wranglers and massage parlors.

I much prefer the normal outside street markets with plenty of good food. This is pigs blood soup, much tastier than the snake soup.


This is a place where you can pick what you want, and they'll cook it for you. I like to take pictures of local people doing normal everyday things, like having dinner at the night market after work.





We happened upon a street procession and followed all the commotion to nearby Longshan Temple. I'm not sure what was going on, but on the left side of the picture below is the carriage-type vehicle everyone was following.